BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTS

The rise of the digital consumer economy is rapidly changing the rules of the recruitment game. Employee loyalty is on the decline, leading to growing talent attrition. This is also in part due to changing workforce demographics such as greater participation from a demanding millennial population. At the same time, unrestricted online marketing of jobs and ubiquitous connectivity have led to resume overload – recruiters are inundated with resumes, making it challenging to identify quality candidates. With more than 40% of all global employers reporting a shortage of talent, competition for human resources has become fierce – a situation further aggravated by the emergence of small and agile companies.

The result: increased cost of hire without a corresponding increase in key performance indicators (KPIs) such as time-to-hire or quality of hire. It’s becoming increasingly clear to staffing organizations that they will need to move away from traditional decision making models and adopt data-driven decision making to deliver greater value and efficiency.

What works best in the digital age?

Several staffing leaders at global companies are making digital transformation of their recruitment function a strategic priority. According to Global Recruiting Trends 2017, 39% of participants are looking to invest in new technologies while another 34% want to focus on innovative recruitment tools for assessment and interviews. Rapidly and creatively deploying innovative solutions leveraging next-gen technologies can help drive recruitment success in the new digital world. Here’s how:

Leveraging mobile and social media platforms underpinned by analytics for recruiting on the move

In this era of mobility and social networking, candidate engagement is emerging as the new battleground. What is the best time to reach out to your pool of candidates? Is it possible to get a more favorable response when a candidate has just had lunch at his/her favorite restaurant? Even better, does the candidate have the required temperament along with necessary skills to succeed in the job?

By understanding what content people are posting on their social media channels or by sharing relevant digital content such as blogposts, it is possible for organizations to create a digital personality fingerprint. Such information helps in identifying the cultural fitment of potential employees with that of the organization, leading to better employee retention and improved candidate satisfaction.

Sharpening market and candidate intelligence to identify and target top candidates

In today’s tight labor markets, the ability to find and engage with top-notch candidates on social media, ahead of your competition can be a significant differentiator.

This means, in a candidate-driven market, it makes more sense to flip the recruitment cycle from outbound to inbound hiring. Inbound hiring solutions using machine learning help build relationships with potential candidates by feeding them with relevant content and slowly drawing passive candidates into the mainstream by offering an intelligently curated list of jobs.

With ever increasing workloads and conflicting priorities, one of the major challenges facing recruiters today is the strain on productivity. How can recruitment companies ensure efficiency and agility while keeping costs low?

Recruitment consultants have a new companion at work in the form of recruitment apps. On the one hand, the apps help working professionals and teams with proactive suggestions on ways to take their performance to the next level, while on the other, they enable organizations to make better hiring decisions.

Enhancing the abilities of the staffing organization’s people assets and extending process efficiencies is a top C-suite priority today. The challenge, however, is the need to retain the human touch even while enabling automation.

Robotic interviews and screening processes are slowly becoming mainstream with advances in deep learning and natural language processing. Robots not only help companies enhance the efficiency of their recruitment processes but also improve the productivity of consultants by easing the resume overload, enabling them to focus on personalizing the experience for a select few candidates.

To stay ahead, constantly look for ways to future-proof recruitment

As a purely information-driven function, recruitment is being impacted by digital disruption more than any other industry. Emerging technologies such as blockchain have the potential to further transform the industry. The candidate database, which has so far been a source of competitive advantage to staffing organizations, can come under threat as all essential information about candidates can be shared on a secure immutable blockchain network. This, in turn, can make candidate resumes redundant and disintermediate the entire value chain! However, the situation would be better if blockchain and smart contract based autonomous recruitment systems are explored as new revenue streams. It’s time to reinvent business models and make these technologies the engines of future growth and success. What do you think? What must recruitment companies do in order to tap into the vast potential of next-gen technologies such as blockchain? Do share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Naveen Pathak leads the Staffing and Recruitment Domain Centre of Excellence (CoE) within TCS’ HiTech business unit. He is responsible for strategizing, conceptualizing, designing, developing, implementing, and supporting IT solutions for the staffing and recruiting business. With over 12 years of experience, Pathak has played several key roles across IT consulting, pre-sales, and delivery in the professional services domain. He is a TOGAF certified Enterprise Architect and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Technology from BIET, Jhansi, India, and a Post Graduate Diploma in General Management from XLRI, Jamshedpur, India.